Beginners Guide to Settling In and Getting Promoted

Beginners Guide to Settling In and Getting Promoted

Summer is here, and you are a few months into your new position after college.  You’ve decided that it’s time to work towards a New You!  You realized that the real world of being a career woman is quite different than you expected.  Maybe you still aren’t quite sure where to start with your transformation. I’m going to spend the summer offering tips in my beginners guide to settling in and getting noticed and promoted.

First thing’s first, your language will have to change… Yes, that includes how you speak with your friends and family.  How we communicate has a direct impact on how we will perform the basic functions of management  (i.e., planning, organizing, leading and controlling).

This includes listening, speaking, reading and writing.

You should listen to and read articles that reflect the communication style of executives in your organization.  Focus on the words that are critical at expressing knowledge and wisdom within your field or industry. Take notice of how they string together phrases from both their speaking and writing.  This will require superb listening skills.

I know it’s going to be hard, but you need to do more listening…Yes, more listening than you do talking.  Research has shown that women speak on average 20,000 words a day versus about 7,000 words a day for the average man.

I’m sure, like me, you found it beneficial during your college years to impress your professors and the other students, but you may not get the same response in a business environment.  If you are someone that focuses on planning the brilliant thing you’ll say or the quick witted response the moment the other person finishes speaking, I’m speaking directly to you. As business professionals, it’s critical that we take in what other people are saying so that we can formulate the response considering additional facts and observations.  You may find out quickly that others stop valuing your observations if it doesn’t include sound thinking beyond the limited information that you may have personally.

In a business environment, you can’t treat conversation like a competitive sport. We don’t get extra points for:

  • Saying the most
  • Making the cleverest point
  • Persuades others of an opinion that don’t include all the available facts
  • Speaking the longest and loudest

Over time if you continuously interrupt, speechify, and come up with witticisms that aren’t supported by the knowledge and wisdom of others you will lose credibility.  The person that displays their superior knowledge is that person that can listen to all the information and then translate it into a sound solution with calculated risk.

In college, you might have received extra credit for persuading others to support your point of view.  We even got labeled as a leader when we continuously displayed our superior knowledge over other students to the teacher.

Those tactics don’t do well in a business environment.

In the business world, the person who’s talking is giving away information.  You are allowing other people to find out all that you know and then formulate how to leverage that new knowledge with the knowledge they have.  If you are the smartest person in a business meeting, then you are not getting invited to the right meetings.  That’s a whole new topic.

Bottom-line, the person who’s listening, is receiving information, where KNOWLEDGE is POWER!

Everyone needs to learn or improve their language skills for their professional or daily lives. That goes for every level of leadership. So how many words did you use today? Or did you spend your day gaining new knowledge?

I’d love to hear from you.  Leave a comment or offer you own advice on this topic.

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